Videogame Review: Dead Space 3

One of the scariest moments I remember from my childhood was the day my dad kicked me out of his house in Boston, shouting that I needed to get more exercise. Nothing bad happened, I just got lost. But I spent the next few hours as it grew darker in a growing panic wondering what I would do and how he would find me. When I finally got back home in tears, he looked at me and said: “well, you must have had a good workout!”

There’s a moment weirdly like this at the beginning of Dead Space 3, the new supremely gorey third person shooter from Electronic Arts and Visceral Games. The protagonist, Isaac Clarke (his name a mash-up of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke) is stomping his way through a dank and monster-infested spaceship, being bombarded left and right by puking monstrosities that look sort of like giant spiked sphincter muscles as he tends to a crew that unfortunately consists of his ex-girlfriend and her new love interest. Nothing makes fights for your life against ugly burping sphincter monsters more difficult than when they come with the added pressure of romantic entanglements, after all.

The “waypoint” in Dead Space, as its name implies, is a tool that literally points you in the direction that you should be going. And it’s nothing unique to Dead Space—countless games feature some sort of Mapquest-like feature that points the player in the right direction every now and then. The unique part in Dead Space is the interface, which is pared down to minimalist essentials. Instead of having a disembodied arrow floating above you like some benevolently cartoonish hand of god, Isaac has to pause and pull out his own GPS system to let a thin blue line wind across the floor.

As a feature for a game placed loosely in the “survival horror” genre, this thin blue line has always confused me. “Survival” implies that the challenge of gameplay is less about besting a particular opponent than mastering your environment—learning to be ruthlessly efficient with the use of resources like ammunition and health, choosing to hide from threats rather than engage them, and, most importantly, figuring out the best places to do so. Played at their hardest difficulties, survival games like Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and Fallout 3 put their players in the same ugly dramatic dilemmas of a story like “The Road.” You might find yourself stranded on a road in Fallout’s wasteland, deciding whether you want to save some helpless family kidnapped by raiders or just take their things and leave with an unsettlingly utilitarian logic. As Metal Gear’s subtitle implies, sometimes that means eating things when you’re not really sure what they are simply because you’re starving. The results aren’t always pretty.

The horror part of a survival horror game, meanwhile, stems from the fact that you feel lost. Mastering an environment is difficult because, like any good haunted house, it can never truly be controlled. Every opened door reveals another threat, every new room another intangible challenge. In System Shock 2 (the spiritual predecessor to Ken Levine’s BioShock series and, in my entirely un-objective opinion, the greatest first-person shooter experience ever made) this is taken literally, as the spaceship you inhabit starts to become sentient and turn against you. The concept of a “waypoint” is all but irrelevant, because it’s impossible to point yourself the right way as the path keeps changing. Your feet clatter on the steel underbelly of the spaceship just fast enough to indicate the rush of panic. This, you think, is what it feels like to be lost. This is what it means to be scared.

Throughout the entire Dead Space trilogy to date, you’re mostly in remarkably similar spaceships of one kind or another, but Isaac Clarke’s gait is a slow and measured thud. If there’s one particular innovation (if you want to call it that) that the series brought to third person shooters and horror games, it’s what EA likes to call “strategic dismemberment.” Basically, this means instead of just shooting monsters in the face, Clarke must target their vulnerable extremities to deal the most damage. And as with the thud of his step, every movement in Dead Space 3 feels immaculately measured to increase your sense of panic—fire too soon and a monster might stumble, but it won’t fall. Fire too late, and you’re greeted with a spectacular vision of your own disembowelment.

Which brings me back to the problem of the waypoint. Dead Space 3 is an excellent game by many counts. But it’s a shock for a series that made one of the best horror games in recent memory that its latest act isn’t really scary. The awkwardness of always having a thin blue line tell you exactly where you should be going limits the potential for spontaneity or discovery, the trembling sensation of stepping into a dark room with no idea what the hell you should expect for that brief terrifying moment before your anxiety crystalizes into the concrete form of a monster to kill.

That’s not to fault the waypoint alone, because it’s been employed since the original Dead Space. But the challenge of making such linear gameplay provocative or scary is building an intriguing world around that thin blue line.Horror games often resolve this problem of linearity with so-called “monster closets”—virtual trap doors that trigger some horrible monster or chainsaw wielding maniac to pop up when you step a certain distance down a hallway or press a button. What made the original Dead Space so groundbreaking wasn’t the fact that it didn’t have a waypoint, because it did. It wasn’t even the “strategic dismemberment,” though that was certainly part of its strange beauty. The genius of Dead Space was just that its monster closets were so well designed. The entire game was a dense, claustrophobic experience tracing a universal story. Ultimately, Isaac was searching for his estranged wife, but he found himself becoming much more intimate with the crowds of sphincter-shaped monsters that kept trying to dismember him before he could (strategically) dismember them.

Improvements in the sound, graphics, and combat mechanics from 2008 to today could only make these monster closets all the more fearsome. And it’s hard to deny the obvious talent behind Dead Space 3, which you feel in every moment of abject panic when a particularly nasty sphincter-shaped monster is lunging at you faster than you can reload or escape. But instead of focusing on the small, private experience that made Dead Space, well, Dead Space, Visceral exploded Dead Space 3 outwards—putting the story in a massive snowbound planet, adding co-operative gameplay, and heaping on more ridiculous lore about the origin of the necromorphs (the technical name for all the spikey sphincter muscles that are trying to kill you) and the fate of the universe. Instead of just hearing the chilling quiet of your own breath, you now shout back and forth with the other characters (and, in co-op, your teammate) with a pedestrian regularity.

A friend likened the relationship between the original Dead Space and its sequel to that of “Alien” and “Aliens” that may be true. But with Dead Space 3, Visceral’s iconic series is starting to feel more like Gears of War than survival horror.

In its smaller, quieter moments, the game occasionally recalls its own lineage. Standing in a dark room above a staircase, you might hear the unseemly sounds of some nightmarish monster below growling or puking. And you might still shiver for a moment before taking the first tentative steps down the stairs. But the problem is it stops there: There’s a lot of tension in Dead Space 3. There is the fear of being trapped. There is the fraught anxiety of running low on supplies. But there is none of the horror of getting lost.

About Speakeasy

Speakeasy is a blog covering media, entertainment, celebrity and the arts. The publication is produced by Barbara Chai and Jonathan Welsh with contributions from the Wall Street Journal staff and others. Write to us at speakeasy@wsj.com or follow us on Twitter at @WSJSpeakeasy or individually @barbarachai.